SOURCE: "Aspects of the Novel," in Madame Bovary On Trial, Cornell University Press, 1982, pp. 169-208.

In the following excerpt, LaCapra argues that "Madame Bovary is not simply a 'tragedy of dreams' that places responsibility for Emma's fate' on her reading of romantic novels." He focuses instead on "how modifications in narrative perspective provide a nonlinear subplot" which he relates to the novel's theme of temporality.

Do not speak to me about modern times, with respect to the grandiose. There is not enough there to satisfy the imagination of a feuilletonist of the lowest order.

Flaubert, June 7, 1844

It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.

Friedrich Schlegel,

Athenaeum Fragments (1798)

Approaching more general aspects of the novel, I shall enlarge the focus on narrative perspective to include other dimensions of Flaubert's novelistic practice, for...